The World Wide Web is a giant assembly of “virtual places,” or sites, that Web users visit. Web surfing, or browsing, is generally an individual experience, in the sense that Web surfers are unaware of other users who may be surfing simultaneously. Network “chatting” has been limited, for the most part, to specific “chat rooms” and “chat sites” provided for this purpose.
A number of solutions have appeared recently that are aimed at enabling richer interaction between Web surfers. In this regard, an article by Shapiro entitled “Virtual Places—A Foundation for Human Interaction,” in the Proceedings of the Second World Wide Web Conference (Chicago, 1994), introduced the concepts of “people awareness” and “document awareness.” People awareness informs the user as to which other users are on-line at the same time as he or she is. Document awareness informs the user as to which other users are viewing the same on-line document or, more generally, are visiting the same virtual place. The object in both cases is typically to enable a chat connection to be established between the users.
People and document awareness capabilities are offered by the Lotus Sametime product family, which is described at http://www.sametime.com and at http://www.lotus.com/sametime. A Sametime server is used to keep track of users at certain virtual places, for example, on a particular Web site or Web page. A Sametime client, which runs on the users' computers, enables users to log onto the Sametime server and authenticate themselves. For each user, the client maintains a list of the other users who are currently at the same virtual place, typically on the same Web page, as he or she is. The server generates an “event” when a user enters or leaves the site or moves to a new page on the site, so that the clients' user lists are updated.
The Sametime server also provides synchronous communications services among the users at the site, including chat capability and sharing of objects, such as screen frames, whiteboard drawings and other applications. It thus allows users to conduct two-party and multi-party on-line conferences. An application program interface (API) and toolkit, which are available for download from the above-mentioned Sametime Web site, allow programmers to develop their own applications using Sametime services.
Awareness and chat capabilities for Web surfers are also offered by some browser plug-in programs, such as those provided by netElement (http//:www.netelement.com) and Gooey (http://www.getgooey.com). When a registered user of one of these programs visits a given Web site, a window on the user's browser screen lists the names of other registered users are also visiting the same site. A chat window on screen enables the user to initiate and join discussion groups with the other users on the same site. netElement also offers a “Follow” command, allowing users who have met at one site to browse together to other sites.